Classic Cars Need A ‘Passport’ When Being Traded In and Out Of The UK Since Brexit

Businesses of all kinds trading in and out of the UK are struggling with red tape and confusion since Britain left the EU. And classic car dealers and auction houses are no different.

Moving cars into and out of the UK has becoming more complicated since the beginning of 2021. Make that more complicated and more expensive.

“When you load a car onto a trailer or into a lorry, it becomes ‘goods’” Peter Bonham Christie, founder of transport firm Straight Eight Logistics told classic insurance specialist Hagerty, which investigated the effect Brexit is having on the international classic car trade.

“You need a ‘green card’ from your insurer for each element – the car, the towing vehicle, and the trailer – and as you’re transporting goods, you also need an ATA Carnet,” Bonham Christie explained.

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The Access/Temporary Access (ATA) Carnet works like a passport for the car being transported. While there’s a fixed fee for each Carnet, the sucker punch is the bond payment, which is set at 40 per cent of the value of the car to make sure it doesn’t disappear once it’s been granted entry to the country.

Start moving vintage Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches like the 993 GT2 pictured above across The Channel and you’re looking at having to find a big chunk of extra cash.

And the bad news doesn’t end there. Hagerty’s report detailed the troubles faced by dealers importing modern classic cars to the UK from Europe. If they’re less than 30 years old the cars are immediately slapped with 20 per cent VAT, potentially making an already expensive car unaffordable.

‘This is a real problem,’ Edward Lovett of online auction site Collecting Cars told Hagerty. ‘A buyer searching for a rarer modern performance model might typically have looked in Europe. Now that comes with a hefty additional cost.’

Even offering cars for sale has become more complicated. The big auction houses often hold sales at different venues across the world, and often offered cars from Europe at their UK-held auctions. But now those cars have to be temporarily imported.